Gertrude Bell
The forgotten female Lawrence of Arabia
In a picture taken to mark the Cairo Conference of 1921, Gertrude Bell – elegant in a fur stole and floppy hat, despite being on camelback – sits at the heart of the action. To one side is Winston Churchill, on her other TE Lawrence, immortalised in David Lean’s 1962 epic, Lawrence of Arabia.
Bell was his equal in every sense: the first woman to achieve a first (in modern history) from Oxford, an archaeologist, linguist, Arabist, adventurer and, possibly, spy.
In her day, she was arguably the most powerful woman in the British Empire – central to the decisions that created the modern Middle East and reverberate still on the nightly news.
Yet while Lawrence is still celebrated, Bell has largely been forgotten. True, her life was the subject of a 2015 film by Werner Herzog, Queen of the Desert, in which she was played by Nicole Kidman. But it did little to revive her reputation.
“Newspaper articles of the time show she was known all over the world,” says Sabine Krayenbuhl, co-director of a new documentary, Letters from Baghdad. The minutes of the Cairo Conference record her presence at every key discussion, but none of the men mentions her in their memoirs. It’s as if she never existed.
Letters from Baghdad aims to restore her to her rightful place. The film is a bewitching mix of archive footage, some of it hand-tinted, that brings to life the magical Middle East of a century ago and tells Bell’s extraordinary life story in her own words, through extracts from letters and diaries read by Oscarwinning actress Tilda Swinton.
Bell, granddaughter of Liberal MP Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, was born in 1868, in County Durham. She paid her first visit to the Middle East after Oxford, when she went to stay with her uncle, who was minister (what we would now regard as ambassador) to Tehran, then in Persia. The city set her imagination alight. “I have landed in the Garden of Eden,” she wrote to her father, adding, “I have had my first Persian lesson with a sheik, who is a darling.” The trip resulted in her first book, Persian Pictures, and a lifelong love affair with the region. “I never weary of the East and I never feel it to be alien,” she wrote a few years later. There were brief visits home, and a period in the Alps during the 1890s, in which she climbed Mont Blanc and almost died after spending “48 hours on the rope” in a storm. But her life from then on was largely spent in the deserts and cities of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). She became known to the Sunni, Kurd and Shia tribes as “al-Khatun” (The Lady) and cut quite a figure as she roamed the deserts, recording and photographing ancient sites. The writer Vita Sackville-West met Bell in Constantinople, where she “appeared out of the desert with all the evening dresses, cutlery and napery she took on her travels.”
“She never dressed in Arab clothes,” says Krayenbuhl. “She felt very strongly that you have to meet the other person as who you are and have an honest exchange, not try to be one of them. One of the reasons men probably saw her as a threat was that she got on famously with the Arabs.”
On an archaeological dig at Carchemish in Mesopotamia she met TE Lawrence, who later said “she was a wonderful person, not very like a woman” (presumably a compliment).
Bell had red hair, green eyes and a thoughtful, fine-boned face. Small in stature, she was forceful: intelligent, energetic and sometimes brusque to the point of rudeness. “In later life, especially, she was quite hawkish,” says Lynn Ritchie, who transcribed Bell’s correspondence for the Newcastle University archives. “Her letters are incredibly articulate and amusing, but she could be impatient, especially of other women.”
In 1907, Bell published The Desert and the Sown, chronicling the Arabian desert and cities for a rapt audience. She photographed ancient sites like Palmyra and began working with archaeologists uncovering ancient treasures. She gathered many such antiquities for her greatest achievement, founding the Baghdad Museum (which was looted after the 2003 invasion but has since reopened).
But perhaps what resonates most today is her assessment of the political situation. At the outbreak of the First World War, Bell volunteered with the Red Cross in France, but British Intelligence had other ideas. She was asked to help soldiers find routes through the Middle Eastern deserts.
It was the beginning of a new career in which she later became a senior adviser to the military governor of newly created Iraq. Being a woman in a man’s world was more difficult for Bell in British politics than among desert tribes. In 1920, she produced a white paper on the government of Iraq and was exasperated that her peers seemed more interested in its author than contents.
Consequently, it is difficult to gauge how much influence Bell had. Some colleagues respected her w“opinions, others could not stomach working with a woman – especially one who knew so much more than them about the landscape. She certainly took part in drawing the borders that created Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And she was partly responsible for selecting Faisal, the new king of Iraq.
But Bell was a passionate believer in Arab self-determination, and was all too aware of the problems the new set-up might hold. Some of her letters have eerie echoes of recent history. “Can you persuade people to take your side when you’re not sure in the end you’ll be there to take theirs?” she asked at one point, noting that “we rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. Muddle through! Why, yes, so we do – wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.”
What she never achieved was lasting love. On that first trip to Tehran, she fell for Henry Cadogan, a member of the foreign service staff. Alas, Cadogan had no fortune and though Bell travelled back to England to persuade her father to approve the match, she conceded: “Henry and I are not allowed to consider ourselves engaged.”
She never saw him again; he died a few months later. The other man she loved, Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, was already married. They exchanged passionate letters but accepted they could never be together.
Bell was found dead in her room in Baghdad in 1926. Her family’s fortune had been ruined by the war and she suffered from pleurisy. It is believed she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, though that may have been an accident. It was a fittingly mysterious end to an extraordinary and exotic life – one worthy of a film every bit as lavish as Lawrence of Arabia.
‘I have had my first Persian lesson with a sheik, who is a darling’